The Marxists were not the only political group to form. In 1901 the revolutionary groups who looked back to the old populist tradition of the 1870s came together to form the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. They continued to believe that capitalism was an artificial transplant on peasant Russia, and in theory would concentrate their efforts on the villages. In practice they found the peasants hard to organize, and most of their followers were in the urban factories. The SRs, as they were called, also absorbed some Marxist ideas to produce an eclectic ideology no less appealing for its lack of consistency. They also continued to believe that terror against government officials was a useful tool, and alongside the SR party agitators in the factories the Fighting Organization waged a relentless war against the government with a series of spectacular assassinations. The police naturally concentrated most of its attention on this group, and from 1903 to 1908 the head of the Fighting Organization was a police agent named Evno Azef.
The last to form an organization, not surprisingly, were the liberals. Their appearance on the political scene was part of the larger ferment in middle and upper class Russia that grew rapidly toward the end of the century. Since the 1860s innumerable professional groups and societies had come into existence, organizations of chemists and engineers, doctors and agronomists. The businessmen were particularly active in forming lobby groups to pressure for favorable economic policies, protective tariffs, and a more modern (and friendly to business) legal framework for their activity. The business groups were not merely groups of manufacturers or bankers dealing privately with the government, they met in conventions, using the great Nizhnii Novgorod fair and the many exhibitions as fora for public discussion of their needs. The newspapers reported extensively on these meetings, which addressed Russia’s many needs but studiously avoided constitutional issues. Many of these organizations were initially supported or even created by the Ministry of Finance as a measure to encourage progress, and the members were mostly intensely loyal in their politics. In the course of time, however, business and other organizations broadened the discussion of social and economic issues, expressing the frustration of these levels of society with a government that they increasingly perceived as too conservative and too slow to respond to the needs of a changing society.
Some of the liberal leaders in the intelligentsia and the gentry began to think that time had come to organize in a more political fashion. For decades they had hoped that the zemstvos would evolve into a system of representation of the public or that new, more liberal measures would come from the government that would replace arbitrariness with basic rights and consultation of the people in some form. None of this transpired, but the zemstvos did provide a forum in which many liberal noblemen and others learned to deal with the innumerable local issues that gave them experience with public life and with the government’s unwillingness to share power to any large extent. By 1901 they had given up, for the government refused to budge, and a small group of liberal activists formed an underground group, the Union of Liberation. Opposed to terror and revolutionary methods, they decided that only an illegal group could get beyond specific issues and conduct the needed discussion and supplement publications smuggled in from abroad.
By 1904 networks of activists of varying persuasions covered the Russian interior’s major cities, and on the western and southern fringes nationalist and socialist groups among the Poles, Jews, Georgians, Armenians, and others added another dimension of instability. Then on January 27 (February 9), 1904, the Japanese navy attacked the Russian base at Port Arthur and sank most of the Russian squadron. Russia was now at war with Japan on the other side of the globe from St. Petersburg. The only line of communication was the Transsiberian Railroad, much of it still a single track and not all of it completed. The Russian army, far from its bases and lumbered with elderly generals, suffered a series of further defeats through the year. In July an SR terrorist assassinated Plehve, and Nicholas appointed the more tolerant Prince Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii in his place. The appointment came unexpectedly and in large part was owed to the efforts of Nicholas’s mother, the dowager Empress Maria. At the same time as Sviatopolk-Mirskii seemed to move toward some mildly liberal measures, another crisis was brewing in St. Petersburg.
The police in the capitals had long been frustrated by the success of the Social Democrats and the SRs among the workers of the city. In spite of continuous arrests they seemed to be making modest progress and alarmed the authorities by their dogged persistence and the readiness of workers to listen to them. Then the head of the political police for Moscow, Sergei Zubatov, had the idea of building a labor union controlled by the police. It would provide some modest social services to the workers to alleviate their conditions while inculcating in them loyalty to the Orthodox Church and the tsar. In St. Petersburg the leader of the union was father Georgii Gapon, who quickly came to enjoy the enthusiastic support of the workers and pose a serious threat to the revolutionaries. Thus when a spontaneous strike broke out at the huge Putilov machine works on the southern fringe of the city, Gapon was in a dilemma. The policy of the police unions was to oppose strikes (seen simply as violations of public order in Russian law), but if he chose that path he knew he would lose the support of the workers to the radicals. He chose to go along with the strike but conceived the idea that the workers should present their grievances to the tsar himself. Gapon assumed that the tsar would listen and do something, which would appease the workers and settle the strike. As the workers approached the Winter Palace in the snow on January 9/22, 1905, the response of the government, nervous about the unrest in the city, was to line up soldiers in front of the palace and order them to open fire on the unarmed crowd. Over a hundred were killed and many more wounded.
Within a few days workers all over the country, from Poland to Siberia, went out on strike by the hundreds of thousands. These were spontaneous movements with no unions, no strike pay, and virtually no leadership. The police union was immediately discredited, and the revolutionary parties were swamped, as they had only a few thousand activists in the whole country.
The Revolution of 1905 that ensued was an extraordinarily complex event. The urban strike movement was enormous, especially considering the lack of experience at such actions on the part of almost all workers, and the inadequacy of organizational structures. In the villages for the first time peasant unrest became widespread enough to provoke massive campaigns of military repression, even if SRs and others still found it extremely difficult to actually organize the peasants. Most of the non-Russian areas experienced the same upheavals as the interior of the country, with nationalist or socialist forces predominant in different areas at different times. The liberal middle classes generally supported all these upheavals, if only passively, and solidly blamed the government for the bloodshed. The government found itself extremely isolated, though Tsar Nicholas tried to hold on to the fantasy of the loyal peasantry corrupted by the intelligentsia and the Jews.
To complicate everything, the war with Japan continued and went from bad to worse. In the spring the Japanese inflicted a major defeat on the Russian army at Mukden. To replace the lost Far Eastern squadron, the navy sent the Baltic Fleet on an epic voyage around Africa and Southern Asia to the theater of operations. There it encountered the Japanese navy at Tsushima in May 1905, and was almost entirely destroyed. At this point, Nicholas and his government realized that they had no option but to make peace, and with Theodore Roosevelt as intermediary, the peace was signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 23 (September 2), 1905. Russia lost the base at Port Arthur and the southern half of Sakhalin Island, but kept its Manchurian railroad and its buildings in Harbin.
These events took place against a background of rapidly growing unrest. In the spring nearly a million workers struck for greater or lesser times in St. Petersburg alone. Some of these were political strikes, but most were about wages and particularly about condescending and rude treatment at the hands of the factory administrations. Peas
ant seizure of land and attacks on the houses of the nobility reached a peak over the summer and spread throughout central Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic provinces, and Caucasus. In Georgia whole areas were out of control of the government, and bandits flourished alongside peasant rebels. Starting in Baku, Armenians and Azeris attacked one another, killing thousands. In the Baltics the ethnic antagonism of German landlords and Latvian and Estonian peasants added extra viciousness to the violence, and Russian Cossacks were put in the position of defending Baltic German nobles. The high point of the summer of 1905 was the mutiny of the sailors on the battleship Potemkin, later immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s film. The sailors demanded better conditions and an end to autocracy, supporting strikers in Odessa before they sailed off to internment in Rumania. This and other military mutinies, continuing into 1906, kept the government at bay.
In August Nicholas, under pressure from his government and his mother, issued a manifesto conceding a representative legislature, but with very limited powers. The manifesto had no effect, and in the autumn the strike movement in the cities resumed with even greater force. In October the strikes turned into a general strike, now a political strike directed against autocracy with calls for a democratic republic. In the absence of other organizations, the St. Petersburg workers began to form councils (in Russian, soviets) at the factory level and then came together to form a city soviet. The Social Democrats were dubious about the soviets at first, but the Mensheviks realized their potential. The most vigorous leader in the St. Petersburg soviet of workers’ deputies was Leon Trotsky, a vivid and powerful orator and one of the main leaders of the Mensheviks. Lenin and his followers quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Finally on October 17/30 the tsar conceded that Russia would have to have a representative legislature, to be called the Duma, and some sort of constitution. The general strike came to an end, but Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted to keep pushing the revolution farther. The result was an insurrection in the factory districts in the west of Moscow in December 1905, suppressed with considerable force by the army and police.
The October Manifesto changed Russian politics completely, perhaps more so than Nicholas had intended. Witte now came back to power in the new office of Prime Minister. Liberal and conservative groups began to form parties, and some of the revolutionaries came at least partially out of the underground. The new parties founded newspapers and enrolled members, preparing for the elections. The beginnings of mass politics brought more sinister forces as well in the form of the Union of the Russian People and many lesser groups of the same type. These were the “Black Hundreds,” devoted to autocracy and Orthodoxy and proclaiming the Jews the source of all of Russia’s problems. Intensely nationalistic, they opposed equality for all the national minorities, but singled out the Jews for bloody pogroms which they believed would put an end to revolution, in their mind the work of the Poles and the intelligentsia, but most of all the Jews. Two Jewish deputies to the Duma fell victim to their terror as well as hundreds in the pogroms. At least four hundred Jews died in the Odessa pogrom alone. While ineffective at combating revolution, the Black Hundreds added another element of violence and chaos to Russian politics.
The government had promised Russia a constitution, and Witte and the ministers produced one that the tsar would agree to. This was Russia’s first constitution, the Fundamental Laws, written by Witte and other government officials and proclaimed on the opening day of the new Duma – April 27, 1906. In the new structure, the Duma was to pass laws, and if the Council of State agreed, they were sent to the tsar for his approval, without which they were not valid. The Council of State became an upper house, appointed by the tsar mainly from the great dignitaries of the state but with some representatives of the nobility, businessmen, and the universities. Rather inconsistently the document proclaimed the tsar an autocrat, but he now had to make laws through the Duma. His power remained predominant, for the Fundamental Laws reserved to the tsar foreign policy, the power to make war and peace, command of the army, and all administrative appointments. For the first time the tsar had something like a cabinet with a prime minister (Witte at first), but the ministers were all responsible to the tsar, not to the Duma.
This was a highly conservative constitution, though not as odd in the Europe of 1906 as it later seemed. The concentration of military and foreign policy power in the hands of the monarch was also a feature of the German and Austrian constitutions, and even in Sweden the ministers were still responsible to the king, not the parliament. What made the Russian system more distinctive was the failure of the cabinet to emerge as a united force (results depended on personalities) and the complex system of electoral franchise for the Duma. The Duma was elected not simply from regions or with property qualifications for voting, but by a complex of regional districts, indirect voting, and the curial system. For each social group (peasants, townspeople, workers, nobles) there was a curia, and the voters cast their ballots within a curia. Still believing in the loyalty of the peasantry and its social conservatism, the elections to the first Duma that took place in winter 1905–06 were based on a distribution of seats that favored the peasantry. Nicholas was convinced that only the upper and middle classes opposed autocracy, but the peasants were on his side.
The outcome of the elections presented the government with a Duma that was impossible to work with. Boycotts by the revolutionary parties meant that the liberals, the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats, officially the Party of Popular Freedom), were the largest party in the Duma, while the peasants, only slowly moving into parties, were the largest group. For the Kadets, the government’s concessions to constitutionalism were far too small, and the peasant deputies surprised everyone by voting for any measure that would give them land. Many did express loyalty to the tsar, but they also wanted the land, something Nicholas and Witte had not bargained on. Nicholas dissolved the Duma in July, hoping new elections would prove more favorable. Witte resigned, and his replacement was Petr Stolypin, a former provincial governor with a reputation for crushing rebellion but also for an interest in reform. The first sign of the latter was the law he sponsored in the fall of 1906 allowing peasants to leave the village community and set up independent farms.
The strike movement and the rural disturbances gradually died down in the course of late 1906. Stolypin sent out punitive battalions into the countryside to repress peasant rebels, with executions carried out on the spot. The elections to the second Duma, however, did not produce the results that Stolypin and the government hoped for. If anything, the new Duma was even more radical than the first. The peasant deputies were now organized into the “Labor Group” that demanded all land for the peasantry. Finally on June 3, 1907, Stolypin dissolved the Duma, and there was virtually no reaction from the public. The revolution had spent its force.
The 1905 Revolution had been a bloody affair, with some fifteen thousand killed, most of them peasants executed or simply killed during government reprisals in the countryside. Several thousand revolutionaries were also executed, and many workers perished in conflicts over strikes or in the various insurrections. Some landowners in the countryside suffered as well, and much property was destroyed. In late 1905 an “All-Russian Peasant Union” had come into existence, which enrolled several hundred thousand members and demanded the surrender of all the land to the peasantry. The Union tried to avoid violent tactics, but its members grew increasingly radical into 1906 and allied with the Labor Group in the Duma. The Peasant Union too was suppressed. The most important outcome was the radical change in Russian politics. The virtual disappearance of censorship and the elections to the Duma and its debates took politics from the halls of the court and the offices of the bureaucracy into the public, even into the streets for the duration of the revolution. Whole social classes began to think differently: the nobility stopped flirting with liberalism and quickly united behind slogans of autocracy, nationalism, and preservation of the social order. The urban middle and working classes lost their pa
ssivity and began to participate in political action and to support some of the more radical parties. The businessmen formed small parties of their own and lobby groups, the peasantry heard the speeches of the Peasant Union activists and the SRs, and learned to vote for its interests in the land issue. The various national minorities now had active political parties: in Georgia the Mensheviks combined socialism with nationalism to become the far and away strongest force. In Latvia the Social Democrats allied with the Bolsheviks and dominated the labor movement. In Poland all the political parties came out into the open, and the National Democrats competed with some success against socialist groups for the allegiance of the workers. Among the Muslim peoples of the empire, the progressive intelligentsia put up candidates for the Duma and won, going on to form a Muslim Duma group that united Tatars, Bashkirs, Crimeans, Azeris, and North Caucasus mountaineers to press for equal status. Like many of the autonomist groups, they allied with the Russian Kadets and participated actively in Duma debates.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 34